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Jewish World Review Feb. 23, 2001 / 30 Shevat, 5761

Dan K. Thomasson

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Goodbye to the SATs --- and good riddance!

http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- THE gates of academia may have begun to creak shut on the SAT, the monster that strikes terror in the hearts of most of America's college-bound teenagers and pain in the pocketbooks of their parents, many of whom can ill afford it.

It is about time.

The decision by Richard Atkinson, president of the University of California, to seek an end to the Scholastic Assessment Test I as a factor in admission to one of the nation's largest, most prestigious schools is a solid blow to the arcane system that has made life miserable for children and teachers and parents for much of the last century.

If approved, California would join nearly 300 other schools, most of them smaller, which have eliminated the SAT and its rival, ACT, as requirements for admission.

Finally, it seems, instructors and administrators are awakening in increasing numbers to the fact this test is, among other things, not only a flawed predictor of whether a student will succeed in college but a bad influence on education. Atkinson contends that too much teaching to the test in a growing number of classrooms undermines a more balanced approach that better prepares a pupil for later studies.

The theory of the SAT was that it could smooth out the vast differences in quality among school districts by setting a common standard for how much a pupil actually had learned. As baby-boomers began to seek higher education in startling numbers, the tests became a convenient way of sorting out those who should or should not be admitted.

It was just much easier and less time-consuming to set a floor on scores and use that, not high-school grades or other factors, as the chief determiner for freshman enrollment. Just let the computer do the dirty work. While dozens of the best schools denied this was the case, the evidence was overwhelmingly to the contrary. Despite an Educational Testing Service warning that the SAT should not be used in this fashion, thousands of youngsters find themselves shut out by an abusive system.

No one dare deny that if one goes to the right schools, particularly private, where preparation to take the SAT begins at an early age or has the financial ability to take expensive review courses and pay for multiple shots at the exam, his or her chances of succeeding are vastly improved. Thus, it is the test's very vulnerability to short-term improvement that belies its claims to being an accurate measurement of how much someone has learned from kindergarten through grade 12.

A vast cottage industry has grown up around the SAT, one that generates millions of dollars annually in fees for "how to" manuals, expensive classes and special one-on-one tutoring. The financial impact on these businesses as well as on that of the Educational Testing Service, which administers the exam, is bound to be considerable as antipathy toward the test grows.

Minority students (and we should include here the poor of all races) suffer most from this process unless given special consideration, often by having to register lower scores, a demeaning, divisive approach. But a decision in California and several other states to eliminate this racial preference from the admission process has resulted in a declining enrollment of African-American and Hispanic students. This drop clearly is one reason behind Atkinson's proposal for ending reliance on SAT I..

Atkinson and others are correctly convinced that there are considerably more accurate and fair means of judging a student's ability to achieve in college. Emphasis should be placed on testing achievement on a wide variety of subjects.

The significance of Atkinson's decision is that for someone of his stature from such a heralded institution to take this step gives legitimacy to the entire anti-SAT movement. There are those institutions that will require the test as long as it is offered. Harvard, for instance, regularly turns away students who have scored the maximum or near it on their SATs and., thus, has no concern. But these elite private schools also long have compensated by fostering enrollment diversity. Race is a serious part of their admission process.

Everyone has a favorite SAT horror story. Mine is about a classmate of my son's whose 4-point-plus grade-point average from a good high school wasn't enough to get her admitted to her first choice because she froze on her SATs and registered a score slightly below 1100, which was an automatic disqualification. She was accepted at a distinguished sister school that didn't misuse the SATs this way and graduated summa cum laude in chemical engineering.

It's time to stop this nonsense.

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Up

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02/09/01: Move over, Bonnie and Clyde

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